Society for Philosophyand Psychology

Prizes

Each year the SPP awards three prizes at its annual meeting. Congratulations to the recent winners.

The 2017 Stanton Award, for a young scholar in
philosophy or psychology who has begun making significant
contributions to interdisciplinary research and has been active
in SPP, went to Felipe De Brigard (Philosophy, Duke).

The 2017 William James Prize, for the best
contributed paper by a graduate student was awarded to Max Kleiman-Weiner and his collaborators Rebecca Saxe and Josh Tenenbaum (Brain and Cognitive Sciences, MIT) for "Learning a Commonsense Moral Theory."

The 2017 Poster Prize was awarded to Sydney Levine, Talia Waltzer, and Alan Leslie (Psychology, Rutgers Univeristy) for "The Role of Choice in Moral Permissibility."

The Stanton award is presented in honor Harry and Betty Stanton of Bradford Books/The MIT Press. The executive committee selects the winner of the Stanton Prize. SPP members are invited to send nominations for the 2018 prize to the chair of the Stanton Prize committee at stantonprize@gmail.com.

William James and Poster Prize winners are chosen by an ad hoc committee appointed by the president in consultation with the executive committee. The process for selecting Stanton Prize winners is described below.

Stanton Prize Procedures

A 'prize coordinator' will be appointed by the executive committee, who may or may not be a member of the executive committee, and who will have primary responsibility for implementing the following procedures:

1) The prize coordinator will send out a call for nominations to the entire SPP membership by email, and further calls as they judge appropriate. The call for nominations will provide information about the prize and procedures for nomination, and will specify a closing date, which should be at least two weeks from the time of the first call for nominations. If, either at the time of closing or during the week prior to closing, it is felt that insufficient nominations have been received or that the nominations received to date are not of adequate quality, then the coordinator should seek the approval of the executive committee to send out a revised call with a later closing date. The revised closing date should be no later than one week after the sending out of the revised call.

2) A nominations will consist of the following, to be sent by email to stantonprize@gmail.com no later than midnight EST on the closing date: (a) A brief statement of no more than 300 words describing: (i) the contributions of the candidate to interdisciplinary research in psychology and philosophy, or related disciplines (ii) the career stage of the candidate, and (iii) the candidates past participation in the SPP. This statement may be supplied by a nominator or by the candidate themselves. (b) The candidate should provide a full and current CV attached as a separate file (.doc or .pdf). (c) A single sentence sent by email from an SPP member in good standing stating that they nominate the candidate and giving their full name. (d) A separate email from the candidate which must (i) state that they wish to be considered a candidate for the prize, (ii) endorse the accuracy of the nominating statement, and (iii) provide a clear and unqualified commitment to attend that year's meeting and give a talk if they are awarded the prize.

3) If a nomination is received that is incomplete or does not otherwise meet the guidelines specified in (2), then the prize coordinator may, at their discretion, either reject the nomination outright, or they may inform the nominator and the candidate of the situation and invite them to correct the problem by a given deadline.

4) The prize coordinator will then send an email to the executive committee containing the names and statements of all properly nominated candidates, and offer to supply the full CVs of candidates on request, or supply a link to a website where they are posted. This should be done one week prior to the vote to allow time for discussion.

5) The 'executive committee', each of whom have a right to vote for the prize, is understood to consist of: the regular members of the executive committee, the past president, the current president, the president elect and the treasurer.

6) The prize coordinator will then send an email reminding the executive committee of the voting procedure and soliciting their votes. The committee members should be given at least two days to return their vote by email. The deadline for votes should be stated in the email, and may be extended by the voting coordinator at their discretion. The winner will be determined by a scoring system as follows: If the number of nominees is n then each member of the executive committee should produce an ordered list of candidates with a minimum length of one and a maximum length of (n-2). In other words, if there are just two or three nominees, then everyone would simply have a single vote. If there are four nominees then each member of the committee would list their preferred two candidates in order of preference. The first would receive 2 points, the second 1 point. If a member lists only one, then that person would receive 2 points. If there are five nominees, each committee member can provide an ordered list of up to three candidates, the first receiving 3 points, the second 2 points, the last 1 point. It should be clear how this would scale up.

7) In the event of a draw, a second vote will be held in which only the top drawing candidates will be considered, and in which each voting member will have a single vote. If this procedure yields a second draw, the president will have the right to select a winner from amongst the candidates who drew in the second election.

8) The prize coordinator will contact the nominated winner and have a conversation with them about their availability to attend the meeting to give a talk. The prize coordinator will then email a summary of the votes to the committee and provide them with a summary of this conversation. If any difficulties, logistic, expense related, or otherwise, have surfaced then the executive committee will have an opportunity to air their views on how best to proceed.

9) If the nominated winner withdraws then it will usually be understood that the next highest scoring candidate will be considered the winner. However, any member of the committee and/or the prize coordinator may propose that second election be held, with or without a further round of nominations. This will proceed only if a majority of the executive committee assents. At any time during this process any member of the executive committee and/or the prize coordinator may call for a vote to withhold the prize for that year. If a majority of the executive committee assents, then the prize will be held over until the next year.

2003, Reese M. Heitner (Philosophy & Linguistics, The Graduate Center, City University of New York)
The Cyclical Ontogeny of Ontology: An Integrated Developmental Account of Object and Speech Categorization